WikiLeaks supporters take down Swedish government sites with DDOS attacks

Multiple government and media websites in Sweden were taken down today by coordinated Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks at around 10AM local time. The Swedish Armed Forces, Sweden.se, the Swedish Institute, and the Swedish Courts websites were among those affected. At the time of writing, the first two were down while the other two were up, but that doesn’t mean much as the sites have been going in and out all day.

I first saw this story via a tweet sent out by the @YourAnonNews Twitter account, which has over 626,000 followers:

#breaking loads of official sites in Sweden down, not one anon claiming responsibility thus far, but this is one Big ass botnet…

The brouhaha surrounding Wikileaks founder Julian Assange may be to blame. The general consensus appears to be that a Free Assange group is responsible for the attacks on Monday.

“We started having problems sometime after lunch – the site was working fine before that,” Therese Fagerstedt of the Swedish Armed Forces Communications and Public Affairs department told The Local, which says it was also affected for a number of hours. “Many different agencies have had trouble today, the Swedish Courts Administration and even Interpol as far as I know.”

The Interpol downtime is interesting because I saw that an Anonymous group had taken down interpol.com exactly a week ago (on August 27) but that interpol.int was working fine. While Interpol does indeed own both, the latter is its main site. Last week might have been a practice run.

A search on Twitter shows that Interpol was indeed taken down last night, though it probably wasn’t for very long. Here’s the earliest tweet I could find, from Anon_Info_Ops, which has almost 10,000 followers:

41-year-old Assange is currently at Ecuador’s Embassy in Britain. He fled there on June 19 in an effort to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is facing allegations of sex crimes. The Australian citizen denies assaulting two women in Stockholm in 2010, insisting the sex was consensual.